


Dog Days Are Over

by aslightstep



Series: Drabblethon: Gen edition [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The First Avenger, Gen, Minor Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Period-Typical Sexism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-28
Updated: 2017-02-28
Packaged: 2018-09-21 06:38:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9536315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aslightstep/pseuds/aslightstep
Summary: Happiness hit her like a bullet in the back/Struck from a great height by someone who should know better than thatMaybe she doesn’t know who she is, but perhaps its time she stopped being so preoccupied with who she isn’t.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Part of my Drabblethon series. Song is Dog Days Are Over by Florence + the Machine.

Peggy had always run the line between being absolutely certain of what she was doing and never quite believing that she could be the person who could do those things.

When she was little, she was supposed to want to be the princess, the damsel in the tower. Instead, she’d played at knighthood. She saved the damsel, be it her dog or her brother or her friends. She swung her mighty sword she had shaped from a branch and the lid of the trash bin served as a shield and she fought.

But a woman, a princess, did not fight. At least not then.

To the point: Peggy knew who she was. She didn’t know if who she was was _right._

_(Later, after the war, after her first big case, it was so breathtakingly simple. She could be both. The princess was the knight all along, and she saved herself.)_

She muddled through for quite sometime. She met Fred Wells, she became a codebreaker. Her brother Michael was always telling her to ‘do more, be more, you’re so much more, Pegs’ but she didn’t _know_. She wasn’t _sure_. 

She was content, in that place of inbetween. _(Later, that would serve her well. Peggy learned to love the brink, that delicious edge of decision, that place where the future was infinite and everything, almost as much as she loved to throw herself over it.)_ And wasn’t that enough? Wasn’t that more that most people got? So she wasn’t _happy_. She could learn. Peggy was highly adaptable. The bride playing princess, playing spy, playing soldier.

The offer to join the SSR lingered on the edges of her mind, and she was almost ashamed at how much she, who had so much, who should be happy here in the place she was meant to belong, thought about it. Michael encouraged her. Told her to stop being scared. That got to her. She never played scared.

Then Michael died. Men in dark suits invading her wedding day to rip her world to smithereens. Peggy had to rebuild her life, rebuild herself. And this time, she had to be sure.

She joined the SSR. She worked at Colonel Phillips side, she freed Erskine, and she had never felt so alive. It was like waking from a deep sleep; the princess, she laughed to herself, and this kiss of true love.

And then she met Steve Rogers. Steve, scrawny and small and so sure, never one to linger in the in between, never one to smile at her with the taunt at the corner of his mouth like all the rest.

Always genuine and brave and true. And she - and this was the most remarkable thing to her, the thing she never could explain - she never wanted to _be him_. She _never_ wanted to play Captain America. She wanted to fight by his side.

She sat at that table with the Howling Commandos, at Steve’s right hand, or perhaps it was Steve at her left, Howard on her right, all of them looking and laughing at each other, job well done, at that round table in France. Knights one and all, and she _belonged._

_(Later, this was the moment she dreamt about when the way it ended it stopped hurting.)_

She was _happy._ Through so much pain **_(Michael)_** , through so much indecision,she was here at another brink, leaning over a great height, looking down below.

The Commandos clinked classes with her. She smiled at Steve and she threw herself over, certain that whatever was at the bottom, it was right where she belonged.

**Author's Note:**

> find me at my tumblaaa [here](http://aslightstep.tumblr.com)


End file.
